How should I determine which startup to launch? That’s the question an aspiring entrepreneur from Asia asked me last month when I was speaking at a social entrepreneurship forum in Washington D.C.

“Analyze data and use your experience,” I responded with a smile.

This approach is especially relevant in Asia where there is a lot of competition. Asian youth have one of the higheststartup rates in the world, according to the World Economic Forum.

The advice we usually get is to do what we are passionate about. Many of us have heard if we choose a job we love, we will never have to work a day in our lives. This popular belief has been attributed to Confucius, the ancient Chinese philosopher.

According to a poll conducted by Gallup last year, only 15% of the world’s one billion full-time workers like their work. So, the idea that we should do what we love makes sense. But often, what the world needs and what one is passionate about are not the same. The success of an entrepreneur often depends on whether she is able to create a product or service to meet a particular need.

How do you go about figuring out what type of service your community needs? Well, if you have resources, you would conduct market research. Most entrepreneurs don’t have that luxury, though. Entrepreneurs should instead use data and their experiences.

In 2014, it had been years since I had cofounded my first non-profit to rebuild schools in Nepal. The non-profit was doing well. I had learned a lot. I was looking to do something else for Nepal, my home country. Inspired by my graduate school training, I started to look at data about the country to understand its needs. Data was not accessible. That was disappointing.

Around that time, I went to Nepal for a family visit with my partner. She wanted to learn how women and people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were accessing technology. We learned that women and poor youth in Nepal, as in many other parts of the world, are less digitally literate than those from elsewhere. We decided to do something that would increase digital literacy and the use of open data in Nepal by founding a non-profit, Code for Nepal, with this mission.

Students attending school in Ghorkha, Nepal.

Many governments---from India to South Korea-- are opening their datasets for public use. But most of them are still unexplored. Even companies are able to leverage “only a fraction of potential value of data and analytics,” McKinsey & Co wrote in a 2016 report. These datasets are useful for entrepreneurs as they would likely discover the biggest challenges a community or country is facing. Challenges are opportunities for entrepreneurs.

For example, in Colorado, the scenic U.S. state famous for its rocky mountains, there is a statewide app challenge called “Go Code Colorado” to build apps to solve business challenges by using open data.

As access to public data increases, aspiring and savvy entrepreneurs alike would benefit from using such data to guide their next startup ideas. But data in and of itself is not enough. Data can be biased or incomplete, leading one to make wrong choices. Many economies lack disaggregated datasets or don’t have data on certain sectors. That’s why using experience is important.

History, as always, offers us lessons. During the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968, relied on data to make decisions as he had done when he was president of Ford Motor Company. Heavy reliance on data prevented the U.S. military from recognizing that Vietnam, however poor and ill-equipped, had high morale and a seemingly endless supply of people willing to fight. Although many factors contributed to the U.S. losing the war to what was then one of the world’s poorest countries, one of the lessons taken from that experience has been that relying too much on data can also be a cause of failure.

It is important to keep our own experience, local context in mind when thinking about a new business idea. My wife and I did that when we founded Code for Nepal.

If you are committed to building products that would meet the needs of the world, there is a very good chance your startup idea sooner or later will succeed.

Presenting updates, insights and commentary, the Under 30 Asia Network is a platform for members of the 30 Under 30 Asia community to share their voice on Forbes.com.